


fairies don't wear shoes

by hepaticas



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-15
Updated: 2012-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 14:03:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hepaticas/pseuds/hepaticas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>FernGully AU - Mark goes on holiday in Brazil, where he accidentally frightens a fairy into shrinking him. The fairy's name is Eduardo and he wears a loincloth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fairies don't wear shoes

The summer before Mark is due to start his first year at Harvard, his family goes on vacation to South America. Not just a vacation, really, but rather a month long trek. It’s supposed to be a graduation present for him, but actually it’s just an excuse for his entire family (both immediate and extended) to get together some place tropical and berate him for being so pale. His parents and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles and even his grandfather on his mother’s side are all going and there’s this little voice in his head that says he should be grateful, because this trip is expensive and they are all at least  _pretending_  to be doing it in his honor, but all he can manage is a sort of silent contempt over the fact that he’s been torn away from his laptop to wander through the jungle and swat at mosquitos.

There are parts of it that he enjoys, to be fair. The food, first of all, because he may survive mostly on tuna and red vines, but he can appreciate good food when it comes his way and everything their tour guide shoves at him is delicious. And his family – well, he loves them, even if sometimes he can only stop himself from insulting them by blocking them out and listing all fifty of the United States in alphabetical order in his head, so the company isn’t bad. Plus, he’s not quite jaded enough to not be able to acknowledge that the places they’re seeing are beautiful. They’re nothing compared to what he can create with just his laptop and his mind, but still.

So several times over the past two weeks, he’s caught himself enjoying the vacation.

This is not one of those times.

He is sitting on the ground by some lake or other, he doesn’t know or particularly care at this point, but he’s pretty certain they’re in Brazil somewhere, and he is drenched from head to toe, courtesy of his uncle George, who popped open one too many cold beers over the picnic dinner they had after the day’s hike and then thought it would be funny to drag Mark kicking and screaming into the water. His only consolation is that when Mark came scrambling out of the water scowling and looking more like a wet cat than anything else, uncle George had laughed so hard that he had  _actually peed himself._ And even that doesn’t help much, because uncle George may look like an idiot now, but Mark is still sopping and his hoodie is stubbornly remaining heavy with water no matter how many times Mark wrings it out, which leaves him in a wet t-shirt that’s clinging to his abdomen and  _that_ means that he’s being subjected to the worried cries of his aunts and cousins, who tut and tell him, “ _you’re just too skinny, Mark! I can see your ribs! ”_

He is maybe sulking now, and his mother is lecturing him about his ‘bad attitude,’ saying something about how this is their ‘29-day cross-continent adventure’ which sounds like she took it straight from the brochure and she keeps telling him that he needs to get in the spirit of things and stop ‘being such a sour face.’ His cousin Frank is setting off fireworks, which can’t be safe in the forest, they’re going to start a fucking fire and then the rainforest will be gone, and maybe then he won’t have to go on any more 29-day cross-continent adventures, and Frank keeps shouting over to him to ‘ _stop being such a faggot, Marky, come blow shit up with me.’_

Also, there’s this stupid firefly – or at least he thinks it’s a firefly, whatever, he doesn’t know much about bugs but it’s glowing, so – and it keeps buzzing around his face and his mother’s head and sometimes it lands on his arm or the back of his neck and that  _really_ tickles. He keeps swatting at it, but it’s too fast. He kind of wants to get up and move away from it, but his mom is talking to him and anyway, he can see there are other fireflies around, pulling the same tricks on his relatives and no one else seems annoyed by them so it would probably just earn him another lecture on negativity.

Between the fireworks and the wet clothes and the lecture and the shouting and the  _fucking firefly_ , Mark is starting to seriously weigh the pros and cons of diving to his death from the top of Iguassu Falls.

He is just deciding that it’s not a realistic idea because Iguassu is miles away when his mother says, “Mark? Are you listening to me?” and he tells her, “I have to pee.”

And then he gets up and wanders into the jungle, clutching a can of bug spray that his sister thrusts at him as he goes because she says she can’t stand to hear him complain about another mosquito bite. He waits until he’s far enough in that his family can’t see him, but he can still find his way back, and then he promptly does not pee. Instead he takes a seat on a moss covered log and codes in his head.

He is recreating bits of the code for Synapse when another firefly shows up (or could it be the same one?), dancing back in forth in front of his eyes. The code in his head jumbles and breaks and he loses it, which doesn’t matter, he’s not  _really_ coding, Synapse is long finished, nothing is lost, but it’s still annoying, and he glares at the little bug, which hovers, undaunted, just between Mark’s eyes.

He raises the can of bug spray slowly until it’s pointed directly at the tiny, glowing bug and he is about to spray when there is this funny little squeak, sort of like when he moves in his ancient ergonomic desk chair at home and it creaks, except then the one squeak turns into a series of squeaks that could be words if they weren’t so  _squeaky._

He has just enough time to reflect that the firefly is odd, in that it doesn’t seem to have a body – it’s just this little glowing ball of light – and then he experiences the very strange sensation of his entire body shrinking and everything goes black.

-

He wakes up to something soft beneath him and the sound of someone muttering, “oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, no, no, no, no, no.” He’s not really lucid enough yet to recognize the voice, but his best bet is that it’s someone from his family. Probably when uncle George tossed him into the water he almost drowned, or maybe one of cousin Frank’s fireworks went a little astray, hit him in the face, and now he’s waking up in a hospital to be greeted by familial concern and well deserved guilt. This is good, really. The hospital will probably have Wi-Fi and if he plays his cards right, he can probably get a laptop and spend the rest of the vacation coding while he recovers from the trauma that is almost dying by the hand of a family member. Yes. This is good.

He blinks his eyes open slowly, dramatically like something out of a Disney film and puts on his very best dazed-and-confused voice as he mutters, “Wha’? Where’m I?” He’s feeling pretty proud of the dropped letters and disorientation in his voice, except then his eyes actually focus on what’s in front of them and he would actually  _really_ like that last question answered.

There is someone hovering over Mark, looking down at him with concern. This much he was expecting. What he was not expecting was for that someone to be a boy of about his age who looks a bit like he’s just stepped out of the pages of Nylon, which is to say he’s really,  _really_  attractive, and yes, fine, that’s the first thing Mark notices, but his brain is addled, clearly, so he can’t be blamed, and anyway, the next thing he notices is that the boy is wearing nothing but a god damn  _red loincloth,_ and his ears are reaching Vulcan levels of pointiness and  _jesus fucking fuck,_ are those  _wings_ sparkling above his shoulders?

(Also, his hair is frankly a little ridiculous in a way that Mark should not find endearing, but does, and no, Mark,  _no_ , pull your addled brain together and focus on the important parts like the loincloth and the ears and the  _wings,_ fuck.)

When he sees that Mark is awake, and talking, the concern on the boy’s face melts momentarily into something like relief and for a few seconds he just grins like he’s trying to split his face in half. “Hi,” He says, and then the concern comes back and he adds, “Are you alright?”

“Fine,” Mark says, a knee jerk reaction to the question and then, “No. Wait. Actually, no. Not alright. Possibly I’m dead.”

The boy’s face does something complicated that involves a squinty half-smile and some blinking and then there’s a noise like he’s trying not to laugh. Mark tries to sit up and he presses a hand to his still wet t-shirt to keep him down. “You’re not dead,” he says softly, like he’s trying to be reassuring, but Mark just stares at the hand on his chest and thinks, fleetingly, that if he did shrink, like he sort of remembers maybe happening, he’s really glad his clothes shrank with him. The boy mistakes his thoughtful silence for something else and takes his hand back, embarrassed.

Mark shakes his head, still looking at the spot where the hand was, and says, “No – you don’t understand. I was sitting in the jungle writing code and now I’m lying on the ground talking to an  _elf,_ so the only logical conclusion is that I am  _dead.”_

The boy wrinkles his nose and smiles again, though not as big this time, as he says, “I’m not an elf!” Mark says, “Oh, good, well, that makes it better then,” at the same time that the boy says, “I’m a  _fairy,_ ” in a tone that suggests it should have been obvious and then he says, “and we’re in a tree, not on the ground,” and Mark glances around and realizes that  _yes, he is on a tree branch, okay, that’s weird,_ and then he promptly passes out again.

-

Mark wakes again about an hour later and when he opens his eyes, he is on the ground and the boy is no longer hovering over him looking concerned. Instead he is sitting on the ground next to him, resting his chin on his knee, managing to look simultaneously bored and amused and – and he is going through Mark’s wallet.

Mark says, “That’s mine.”

The boy starts, falls backwards a little and actually tosses Mark’s wallet up in the air. He catches it again, fumbles with it for a second, and then sort of holds it against his chest with one hand. “You’re awake,” he says, and Mark stares, because that’s slightly better than saying  _duh._ The boy completely ignores Mark’s silence. His face splits into a huge, ridiculous grin. “Hello, Mark Zuckerberg,” He says, tipping Mark’s wallet away from his chest a bit to read the name from Mark’s ID as he speaks. When Mark continues to stare, the boy says, “I bet you’re wondering what’s going on.”

“No,” Mark says, annoyed now, “I love waking up on the ground with a half-naked guy going through my things. It’s a great turn of events. Go with the flow, that’s my motto.”

The boy continues to ignore him. He starts going through Mark’s wallet. “Just don’t panic,” He says, as if Mark already is, “Everything is going to be fine. I just shrank you. It’s okay. It’s  _totally_ okay, because I’m going to fix it. Just don’t freak out and everything will be  _fine.”_ His voice gets a little squeaky towards the end. Mark isn’t reassured. The boy peers into a pocket of the wallet, pulls out an old condom, holds it up to the light and asks, “What is this?”

“A condom,” Mark says blankly, and then, “What do you mean ‘shrank me’?”

He doesn’t look away from the condom, which he has started to turn this way and that. “I mean I made you small. Very little. Tiny. Well, to you anyway. Normal to me. It’s a very nice size. What’s a condom for?”

“Sex,” Mark tells him. “ _Why_ did you shrink me? How?”

The boy blushes and Mark wonders idly which thing caused it. He tucks the condom back in and pulls Mark’s credit card out of its slot. “Magic,” He says. There is a long pause and then he adds, a bit quietly, “And I was frightened.”

“Frightened?” Mark says, incredulous. “Of  _what?”_

“What is this?” He’s holding the credit card up to the light, bending it slightly.

“My credit card. Don’t do that, you’ll –“ He bends too much and the credit card snaps in half. “Break it.” Mark finishes lamely.

“Sorry,” The boy says sheepishly.

“It’s fine.” Mark tells him, because he has bigger issues than having to reorder his credit card at some point in the future. “Frightened of what?” he prompts again.

“Of you.” The boy admits quietly. He doesn’t look at Mark, just tucks the two halves of the card back into the wallet and pulls something else out. Mark thinks it’s his father’s old business card, worn and faded because it’s been in that same pocket for years, gone through the wash a few times. “Edward Zuckerberg,” He reads. “What’s a dentist?”

Mark doesn’t answer that, instead says, “Of  _me?_ But I wasn’t doing anything. I was just – I was sitting on a log. I was sitting on a log, doing  _nothing._ I’m supposed to be going to Harvard in September! I have things to do, okay? I was going to do things, be somebody. I was going to have  _sex._ I have been working for this and now I’m tiny because you were scared of me and all I was doing was sitting on the log, about to kill that firefly –“

The boy flinches and squirms at the word ‘kill.’ He whispers, “I’m going to fix it.”

Mark ignores him completely, because: “Oh my God. Oh my  _God._ I was going to kill the firefly. I was going to kill the firefly and the firefly was. Oh my God, the firefly was  _you._ ”It’s not a question, but the boy nods anyway, clearly uncomfortable. “Oh my God,” Mark moans again and then he has to sit up all the way and put his head between his knees because whatever, okay, he is not a robot and he almost  _killed someone,_ not a bug, a person, or a fairy, or an elf, or whatever, but fairies and elves are people, too, probably, that’s the sort of thing people would say if they knew they existed and that means he almost killed a person, a living, breathing, person with big eyes and stupid hair. He’s pretty sure he’s going to throw up.

“It’s… okay?” The boy says, sounding a little amused and a little sympathetic and a lot confused.

“Ugh,” Mark replies intelligently. After another moment of breathing, he sits up straight and demands, “What were you even doing, flying all over me? Why would you – _why?_ ”

The boy blushes again. “We do this thing – or rather, the other boys do it, I never have before. I’m not supposed to. I’m forbidden actually, um, but a couple of guys talked me into it tonight, so I went and um, the thing, the thing we do, I mean, we find humans and we just sort of – try to bother them until they go away? It’s like a game, to see who can drive the humans away without getting caught. So we were doing that, and I was supposed to be driving you away and I followed you away from the others and then you were going to – well, you know. So I got scared and I – I don’t really know what I was trying to do, okay, my magic is sort of… spotty, but I shrank you and now my father is probably going to kill me, but don’t worry, it’s fine, he’ll fix you first, I’m sure.”

 Mark refrains from commenting on how stupid the game thing is and just says, “You can’t fix me?”

The boy shrugs and his whole body is involved in the movement. He says, “I could try, but – it was really only on accident that I did the thing before. I don’t really know what would happen.” Mark puts his head between his knees again. He looks up a moment later when the boy says, “What’s this?”

He’s holding Mark’s social security card. “Who  _are_ you?” Mark asks, incredulous again.

The boy’s face splits into a huge, earnest grin. “Eduardo,” He says. “Nice to meet you!”

“I fucking hate you,” is Mark’s answer. Eduardo just grins at him some more.

-

They're walking through the forest - or rather Mark is walking and Eduardo is sort of floating along beside him. Eduardo is flying backwards, making it look like the easiest thing in the world, which, okay, Mark can't fly, but he's pretty certain if he could, if would  _not_  be that  easy. They aren't talking, haven't talked since Eduardo revealed that Mark was going to have to wait four days to be put back to his normal size -

_“So take me to your father then,” Mark had said expectantly._

_“I can't” Eduardo said, pointedly not meeting Mark’s eyes, “He's away.”_

_“Away?! Where the hell do fairies go away to?”_

_“'That's secret fairy business, I’m afraid.”_

_“Fine. So when will he be back?”_

_“Four days? ...Don't panic! It's fine. We'll go back to the village and hang out there until he gets back and it'll be fine, seriously, four days will have passed before you know it!”_

_“...If I say ‘there’s no such thing as fairies’ will you die?”_

_“No?”_

_“Fine, I hate you, let's go.”_

 - but every once in a while, Mark will glare at Eduardo and say something stupid and petulant like, 'I hope you fly into a tree,' or 'who cuts your hair, a bat?'

Eduardo just keeps grinning at him. It's really fucking annoying.

(What's most annoying is how impossible it makes it to be really annoyed with him.)

When they've been walking for about an hour, Mark starts to stumble - not because he's tired, but because walking through the jungle is fucking hard, okay, it's hard when you're the size of a regular human and it's even harder when you're not quite three inches tall. The fourth time he stumbles, Eduardo catches his elbow to steady him and jokes, "Maybe I should carry you."

Mark says, "If you even try, I will make certain you never have little winged fairy babies," but he doesn't pull his elbow free. He tells himself that's because he doesn't want to fall again and not because he kind of likes the touch. He's definitely _not_ screaming  _'he touched me, he touched me,'_  on the inside, because that would be stupid and he is not actually a thirteen year old girl.

Eduardo let's go of Mark's elbow, then turns around to fly forward a moment later, bumps their shoulders together and says, "Fairy babies don't have wings, Mark. We don't get them until we're at least two. Nearly impossible to catch a two year old fairy, but they're so  _cute_!"

Mark says, "You disgust me."

Eduardo bumps their shoulders again and says, "We’re nearly there now."

-

The village, when they reach it, is not so much a village as it is a glittering city in some trees. It's like something straight out of a fairytale: there are hundreds of little glowing caves in spirals around the trees, which on first glance seem to have been carved in, but on second look, it's obvious the trees just grew that way. The cave entrances are covered with sheets of moss, but a soft golden light is clearly visible through them. There's other multi-colored lights -  _other fairies_ , Mark thinks - flitting around and there's an enormous towering  _something_  covered in flowers and vines in the center of city.

"Town hall," Eduardo says when he follows his gaze to the thing. "Come on," he adds a second later with a jerk of his head. He starts walking off to the left towards one of the smaller trees, glancing behind him to see if Mark is following. He is.

"I live up there," he says, pointing up to the top of one of the bigger trees near the center, "But since you won't let me carry you, we’re going to have to trade with someone lower."

Mark asks, "Haven't you ever heard of stairs?"

"I have heard of those actually - nasty archaic things for people without wings. Elves use them. I hear that's why they're so grumpy: their legs are always tired from all that climbing."

"I'm having trouble figuring out if you're bullshitting me or not."

Eduardo hides a smile as he says, "Come on, we're here."

 _Here_  turns out to be a ground level tree-cave, glowing with golden light. As they approach, someone shouts, "Christopher, you wound me!" and someone else answers, "You are the most ridiculous fairy I have ever had the displeasure of knowing,” and then a blue light joins the golden one and a few seconds later a glowing blue fairy comes flying out of the cave in a huff.

The fairy stops just as the moss curtain falls closed behind him. The blue light surrounding him disappears the second he stops flying and then Mark can see his features clearly. He's about Mark's height with auburn hair that looks very red in the fading evening sunlight. He has big puppy dog eyes, which, really, is that just a fairy thing, because  _seriously_ , and when he takes in Eduardo and Mark standing in front of him, his expression quickly goes from petulant to an enormous shit-eating grin. "Wardooo!" He says, throwing his arms out to his sides like he's asking for a hug.

Eduardo grins at him and sort of shimmies in place. "Dustiiiin, hey buddy!"

His smile fades abruptly a second later when Dustin really looks at Mark, furrows his brow comically and asks, "What…?"

"Let’s go inside," Eduardo says, shuffling nervously. "I'd rather explain just the one time."

"Alright," Dustin says easily, turning around to go back in, "But I should warn you, Chris is in one of his  _moods_."

Dustin goes inside and Eduardo follows, stopping to hold the curtain aside for Mark. As Mark passes, Eduardo whispers, "That means Dustin did something Dustin-ish and Chris is annoyed by how stupid his life is."

Mark can't help it: he laughs.


End file.
